Creeds and doctrines are
ideas about truth, and not truth itself, and the aim of Zen is to sweep away
all formulae, symbols and doctrinal substitutes which stand between the individual
and enlightenment.

... there can be no association
of awakening with ideas of attainment, of spiritual superiority, of success,
of mastery, or of claims to any prerogative.

There are certain truths
which have to be stood on their heads before they can be noticed at all; in
the ordinary way they are so simple that we fail to perceive them, and they
have to be complicated in order to be presented for thought and discussion.

... you will find in many
yoga texts that one of the first exercises in meditation is to relax the mind
in such a way that all its contents gradually rise to the surface; the texts
go on to say that you will find yourself thinking all kinds of terrible things,
things which you never dreamed could exist in your soul.

Civilized man with his acute
self-consciousness has always been possessed with the idea that he is in some
way out of harmony with life, that he is leading an artificial existence, that
he is a lonely orphan divorced from nature, and most of his religion and psychology
is so much chattering about this, as society women with nothing better to do
will chatter about an imaginary illness.

For, as I understand it,
myth is the imagery whereby we project upon the known, external world the ever-changing
and ungraspable pattern of our own unconscious and inner workings.

Science did not ... dissolve
the Ptolemaic-Christian cosmology by discovering it to be a mental projection
upon the woid, but by discovering it to be an inadequate explanation of astronomical
facts. The cosmology was a myth and a projection, indeed; but it was not so
much this that made it false as that it did not fit the observable form of the
screen.

To me, philosophy and religion
have always been ways of expressing the sense that being alive is uncanny and
strange; and thus it has seemed utterly incomprehensible that there are people
for whom they are of no interest.

By and large, however, this
universal tradition of the eternal moment is especially associated with spiritual
experience and with the arts - and always it carries the implication that there
is some very special and splendid insight to be discovered in a kind of concentration
upon the immediate moment. It is as if one were to find out that the moment
in which we live is a sort of keyhole through which one may pass into a world
in which - on the one hand - time does not rush by, and - on the other hand
- life is not merely dead and static. It is to discover that the whole point
of being alive does not lie in some future destination, some far-off ideal yet
to be attained, but that in some very queer way, this particular instant in
which we are living is the fulfillment of everything and leaves nothing more
that is of any real importance to be desired.

From a relative standpoint,
from within the framework of certain conventions and social institutions, our
lives have purpose and meaning. But there is another standpoint from which we
are not going anywhere but nowhere, from which all the complex and marvelous
creations of human culture are like the intricate but meaningless patterns of
bubbles on the seashore. For sanity's sake we need to see both viewpoints.

Concentration in the sense
in which I am using the word means, not staring at, but being centered in this
one moment and not comparing it with any other. It requires simply the understanding
that there is no other moment than this one: there never was, and there never
will be.

Our satisfactions are more
than ever projected into the future. Tomorrow assumes an ever-growing significance
- to the degree that happiness eludes us in the present. To say that something
has no future is to damn it outright. On the other hand, to have a future is
the measure of value, and this future is what we pursue at ever-increasing speeds.

... no one can effectively
overcome the mad greed of anxiety, until he has realized that the future is
a mirage which does not contain the answer to anything.

I feel that there is a deep
and quite extraordinary incompatibility between the beauty of Christianity and
the beauty of nature. Speaking personally still, I have always found it quite
impossible to relate God the Father, Jesus Christ, the angels and the saints
to the universe in which I actually live.

For God is conceived in
the image of a throned monarch, and the rituals of the Church are patterned
after the court ceremonials of the Greco-Roman emperors.

... the Chinese conceived
of the power behind nature not in the image of a monarch but as the Tao, the
course or flow, and found images for it in water and wind, in the air and the
sky, as well as in the processes of growth.

In the Church, we are in
a universe that has been made. Outside the church, we are in a universe that
has grown. Thus the God who made the world stands outside it as the carpenter
stands outside his table, whereas the Tao which grows the world is within it.

It is ... the marvelous
quality of unselfconsciousness - the quality of the man who can think, act,
and live without anxious side-glances at himself which spoil the directness
and effectiveness of his action.

... a person who feels a
conflict between a moral conviction and his natural feelings finds himself at
odds, not only with his family or his community, but with the very root and
ground of life. This is the peculiarly Western sense of sin, of radical and
natural uncleanness in one's very vitals.

... wars fought in the defense
of absolute moral principles are far more devastating and frightful than wars
which spring from such ordinary human passions as greed.

... in any real adult initiation,
the mystery so closely guarded from the profane and undisciplined is precisely
that the absolute is unconventional, that it is beyond good and evil, and that,
by consequence, we cannot go against it or be separated from it.

Herein lies the identity
of the two opposed wisdoms of the West - of the Church and of the secularists,
of the theologians and the positivists. Both have confused the conventional
with the real - the one by identifying God with goodness, and the other by identifying
the order of nature with the order of words, and this is one and the same mistake.

I am afraid it is the measure
of our profound inner insecurity that we are so damnably tidy, that we cannot
tolerate the presence of saints or lunatics, that we cannot really live with
people who disagree with us about anything serious, that we conceal and avoid
emotions, and make ourselves more and more into the semblance of Kipling's monkeys,
the Bandalog, crying, "We all say so, so it must be true!"

The image I have of myself
is a caricature arrived at mainly through my interaction with other people who
tell me who I am in various ways, either directly or indirectly. I play with
their picture of me and they play something back to me, and we establish a shared
conception of me.

A lot of the current quests
for identity among younger people are a search for an acceptable image. What
role can I play? Who am I, in the sense of what am I going to do in life?

You are an aperture through
which the universe looks at itself, and because of the universe looking at itself
through you, there is always an aspect of itself that it cannot see. It is just
like a snake pursuing its tail, because the snake cannot see its head as the
observer can. We always find, as we investigate the universe, ever more minute
things; and as we make bigger and bigger telescopes the universe expands. Why?
Because it is running away from itself, in both directions.

Intellectualization creates
a gap or lack of rapport between you and your life. You may think about things
so much that you get into the state where you are eating the menu instead of
the dinner, you are valuing the money more than the wealth, and you are confusing
the map with the territory.

"No one perceives anything,
and no one experiences anything - there is simply seeing and experiencing."

In a neurological sense,
everything you see is yourself. What you are aware of is a state of your nervous
system, and there is no other knowledge whatsoever.

You do not have to attend
to your body unless you are sick. The government of your body happens automatically,
going on day after day after day. The better it is the less you have to think
about it. On the deepest level, a person can get in the way of his own existence
by becoming too aware of himself.

... if you want to see the
inside of your head all you have to do is keep your eyes open, because all that
you are experiencing in the external, visual field is a state of your brain.

In the process of being
brought up by parents and teachers, we are made tolerable to live with on the
one hand, but on the other hand we are unavoidably damaged. As a result, in
our culture, it is increasingly popular to undergo psychoanalysis after we complete
our education, to work out all the damage and traumatic shocks we experienced
in the process.

The core of Zen training
... is to live spontaneously, and this is why it is so fascinating to many Western
people, and especially Western intellectuals, who are overburdened with self-consciousness.

If one must try to say something
about what Zen is ... I must emphasize that Zen in its essence is not a doctrine.
There is nothing you are supposed to believe in, and it is not a philosophy
in our sense; that is to say, it is not a set of ideas, an intellectual net
in which one tries to catch the fish of reality.

As a matter of fact, far
from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly
interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of
shadows on the floor in front of you, all these things are, without being named
and without saying, "That's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's
foot." When you do not name things any longer, you start seeing them.

Quotations

Chuang Tzu
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses
nothing; it receives, but does not keep.

Goethe ["Fragment Upon Nature"]
We are encompassed by her, enfolded by her - impossible to escape from her and
impossible to come nearer to her. The most unnatural also is nature. Who sees
her not on all sides sees her truly nowhere. Even in resisting her laws one
obeys them; and one works with her even in desiring to work against her.

Lieh-tzu
I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear, I let my eyes see whatever
they wanted to see, I let my feet move anywhere they wanted to go, I let my
mind think of whatever it wanted to think, and it was a very strange sensation
because all my bodily existence seemed to melt, and become transparent, and
to have no weight. I didn't know whether I was walking on the wind or the wind
was walking on me.

Robert Oppenheimer
[Science is] ... the things we have discovered about nature defined in terms
of the ways in which they were found out.